Many languages, such as JavaScript and PHP, have a urlencode() function which one can use to encode the content of a query string parameter.

"example.com?value=" + urlencode("weird string & number: 123")

This ensures that the &, %, spaces, etc. get encoded so your URL remains valid.

I see that golang offers a URL package and it has an Encode() function for query string values. This works great, but in my situation, it would require me to parse the URL and I would prefer to not do that.

My URLs are declared by the client and not changing the order and potential duplicated parameters (which is a legal thing in a URL) could be affected. So I use a Replace() like so:

func tweak(url string) string { url.Replace("@VALUE@", new_value, -1) return url
}

The @VALUE@ is expected to be used as the value of a query string parameter as in:

example.com?username=@VALUE@

So, what I'd like to do is this:

 url.Replace("@VALUE@", urlencode(new_value), -1)

Is there such a function readily accessible in Golang?

2

1 Answer

Yeah you can do it with functions like these ones here:

package main
import ( "encoding/base64" "fmt" "net/url"
)
func main() { s := "enc*de Me Plea$e" fmt.Println(EncodeParam(s)) fmt.Println(EncodeStringBase64(s))
}
func EncodeParam(s string) string { return url.QueryEscape(s)
}
func EncodeStringBase64(s string) string { return base64.StdEncoding.EncodeToString([]byte(s))
}